Link Building With Directories

Let’s be honest, directory link building has become an extremely spammy method of link building.

However, just because there’s a lot of people profiting off of paid submissions to their lousy directories and others capitalizing by offering services and software to spam these lousy directories doesn’t mean we have to do it that way too.

Whew…glad to get that off my chest

The majority of directories are garbage and have the following traits:

They have every category/niche represented

They have paid submissions

They promise to accept you if you pay

Free links require a reciprocal link

There are tons of extremely similar sites like these. Your link will end up on a page with no PR that may not get indexed/cached, not to mention reciprocal linking really isn’t a great practice these days.

If you were a search engine, would you care about a link like this? If you’re thinking, “well maybe they would care if I had 1,000 of these links”, then you’ve missed the point.

My goal is to help you discover new actionable tips and strategies for SEO and link building. So here are some GOOD directories you can submit to and directions on how you can find many more.

These are a few kinds of directories that ARE beneficial to your rankings:

Local Business Directories

Blog Directories

Niche Directories

Besides this, let’s not forget about the big 3

Dmoz

Yahoo Directory

Best of the Web

Dmoz is free to submit and be accepted, but they are rather strict and it takes a long time to get accepted. Not to mention, they never tell you if you are accepted or rejected. Take the time to submit your site and forget about it for a few months. If you’ve been accepted that’s great, otherwise resubmit your site, rinse and repeat.

Yahoo and BotW are pretty expensive, so give it some thought before submitting your site. Also, they can reject your site even if you pay, so make sure you’re ready when you submit your site. For $150 I still think you can build some better links, but it is worth considering.

Now let’s get to all those free directories…

Local Business Directories:

www.Localeze.com

www.Biglocal.com

www.Openlist.com

www.yellowpages.com

www.citysearch.com

www.yelp.com

www.superpages.com

www.Outside.in

www.lacartes.com

Blog Directories:
www.PlaceBlogger.com – for blogs that talk about local news
www.Bloglines.com – local business blogs
www.Technorati.com
www.Blogged.com
www.BlogCatalog.com
www.Zimbio.com

Search Strings:

The link building directories list above will give you a good start, but the really good directory links come from niche directories. If you can find a page with PR and only a few links on it then you can get a strong, contextual link to your site.

Here are a bunch of search strings you can use to find these directories:

(You can use your keyword or your niche/industry or connect different phrases for each search string)

“Your Niche/Industry” Directory

Your Keyword + “submit site”

Your Keyword + “submit url”

Your Keyword + “intitle:directory”

Your Keyword + “intitle:resources”

Your Keyword + “directory list”

Your Keyword + “inurl:list”

Your Keyword + “intitle:list”

Your Keyword + “inurl:directory”

Your Keyword + “inurl:resources”

Your Keyword + “add url”

Your Keyword + “submit url”

Your Keyword + “suggest url”

Your Keyword + “suggest a url”

Your Keyword + “submit site”

Your Keyword + “submit a site”

Your Keyword + “submit your site”

Your Keyword + “add a url”

Your Keyword + “add a site”

Your Keyword + “add listing”

Your Keyword + “add your listing”

Your Keyword + “submit a listing”

Your Keyword + “submit listing”

Your Keyword + “submit your website”

(yes, it is difficult to find niche directories if you’re in the marketing or SEO niche. Try to be creative)

You’ll find some of the same sites reoccuring with the above search strings, but you’ll find some new ones each time as well where you can make new backlinks.

Bonus Tip: I like to set Google settings to display the first 20 results. This way I don’t miss out on a good result that might be on the second page, but I’m not delving into irrelevant results.

Do you have any other search strings to add? Have you done any directory building before?